The World's Fittest Book: How to train for anything and everything, anywhere and everywhere

by Ross Edgley

Put simply, a leisurely 5-km run will improve your aerobic fitness, but may not be best suited to enhance your anaerobic fitness. But an interval-based workout – trying to complete ten 100-metre sprints with 40 seconds of rest in between – could potentially improve both.

‘You’re not using your most powerful muscles in your legs. You’re trying too hard to pull with your arms, which is completely inefficient. Think of it like a deadlift into a row, rather than a bicep curl.’

Rowing

‘The caloric expenditure of rowing estimated from a 6-minute rowing ergometer exercise was calculated at 36 kcal/min, one of the highest energy costs so far reported for any predominantly aerobic-type sport.’ Why was this so important? Because contrary to what many believe, rowers are living proof that strength and stamina can co-exist.

So where does this fear of cardio and muscle loss actually come from? Well, there is the view that to bulk up you need to consume more calories than you use and any form of cardio will burn those precious calories and therefore your muscles.

But personally (and from those World Champions in strength sports) I’ve found this to be a very, very simple view of the human body.

This is because (again) we are not calorie-controlled machines. It’s not as simple as counting calories in and out and then watching the muscle grow or shrink in relation to this. As we’ll discover, there are thousands more processes within the human body that have a...

While this is a whole other article in itself, it’s enough to know that if you’re meeting your macronutrient needs (protein, carbs and fats) with a nutrient-dense diet with sufficient calories (it’s important to note ‘sufficient’ and not excessive like so many people beli...

Under what conditions can strength and stamina exist in harmony? The answer (supported by Swedish scientists) is: rowing, cycling, Strongman and many more…

Cardio – or anything that sent your heart rate above 100 beats per minute – was avoided in fear that it would plunge your muscles into a catabolic state and ‘eat away’ at your hard-earned muscle.

But Swedish researchers not only exorcised the myth, they proved cardio could actually ‘elicit greater muscle hypertrophy than resistance exercise alone’. What this means is combining cardio with weight training could actually increase muscle size.26

‘These results provide novel insight into human muscle adaptations… and offer the very first genomic basis explaining how aerobic exercise may augment (improve), rather than compromise, muscle growth induced by resistance exercise.’

Hard to say, but it’s widely known that performing any form of cardiovascular training dramatically improves your capillary density. Capillaries are the small blood vessels that network through the muscles, and by increasing their density you also increase your own ability to supply the working muscles with blood, oxygen and nutrients during training.

For strength athletes, this would also mean faster recovery rates between sets and therefore an ability to increase work capacity, which as we know from Chapter 7 could be invaluable.

Increased capillary supply

‘Every human being is the author of his own health or disease.’ BUDDHA DON’T OUTSOURCE YOUR HEALTH ‘There are many things you can outsource, but your health should not be one of them. Own your food and fitness with conviction.’ ROSS EDGLEY

He believed there are no experts, only well-practised individuals, claiming: ‘The term expert is used to describe highly experienced professionals.

When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents.’

No body is the same, no limb is identical and no hormonal response to training is equal. The relatively new field of nutrigenomics – the study of how our genes interact with our food – teaches us our diet is no different either.

The very idea of the ‘perfect’ workout that’s broadcasted to the masses defies the Law of Biological Individuality.

To quote Albert Einstein, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.’